Case study · Home-network parental controls · Mac
FamilyGate
Turns the Mac you already own into your home's internet gatekeeper: no new router, no subscription, nothing leaves your home.
The challenge
Families have phones, tablets, laptops, consoles and smart TVs, each with its own parental settings and its own loophole. Most network-wide solutions need new hardware or a subscription and send your browsing to someone's cloud.
What we built
- A native macOS app that maps every device on the home network and lets parents assign devices to people.
- A private DNS filter running on the family's own Mac: lookups are allowed, blocked or sent to SafeSearch in milliseconds, entirely inside the home.
- Pauses and schedules (bedtimes, school hours), per-person filter levels, and SafeSearch and YouTube Restricted Mode locked on.
- Protection against common workarounds (encrypted DNS, iCloud Private Relay, VPNs and proxies), with Touch ID-protected rules.
- A menu bar control, filtering that keeps running after reboots, and an activity log of blocked lookups only.
Technology
- Swift
- SwiftUI
- macOS
- Private DNS filtering
The result
Free for Mac, notarized by Apple, with no account, no cloud and no ads.
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